VISIONARY REVUE

PARIS SUMMER 2001

FUCHS ON
DALI

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

"...Standing before a picture, the artist responds to something that he is, that awakens, and comes to life - by looking at art.. You know, art, the way I understand it, is also the discovery of all the artists who have been before you... that, they are in you... and you have to revive them. This resurrection of the arts goes on, I think, from generation to generation..."
- Ernst Fuchs (1)

PREAMBLE:
ENCOUNTER AND AWAKENING

In 1947, Ernst Fuchs attended an exhibition where he was able to examine Surrealist paintings up close for the first time. Among them was The Lugubrious Game by Salvador Dali - and it had the seventeen year old painter enthralled:

"That was the first Dali - one of the best - so small in scale, but we could all see, from the first, how well these people could draw and paint. This precision, I decided, is something I must have. In Dali I found a confirmation of what I wanted to achieve."(2)

This was the opening of the eye: the desire to portray the inner world of dreams and fantasms with a refined technique. But something more had happened: Fuchs had found in Dali's vision something recognizable, something undefineable, yet betokening kinship and affinity - the tacit recognition of shared vision.